snake-dance

Definitions

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. A ceremony or dance in which snakes or images of snakes are used; particularly, a ceremony of the Hopi in which live rattlesnakes are caught and carried by the priests in their mouths. The ceremony is related to observances intended to procure rain.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Examples

An effigy of the kaiser is washed down Wall Street with a fire hose; confetti pours down; 800 Barnard girls snake-dance on Morningside Heights, and a coffin made of soapboxes is paraded down Madison, with the kaiser symbolically resting in pieces within.

The snake-dance and antelope-dance, which we had come to see, are not only interesting as relics of an almost inconceivably remote and savage pastanalogous to the past wherein our own ancestors once dweltbut also represent a mystic symbolism which has in it elements that are ennobling and not debasing.

As their type becomes dominant the snake-dance and antelope-dance will disappear, the Hopi religious myths will become memories, and the Hopis will live in villages on the mesa tops, or scattered out on the plains, as their several inclinations point, just as if they were so many white men.

I did not happen to run across any Mormons at the snake-dance; but it seemed to me that almost every other class of Americans was representedtourists, traders, cattlemen, farmers, government officials, politicians, cowboys, scientists, philanthropists, all kinds of men and women.